Outline Reviewed By Wally Wood of Bookpleasures.com

Wally Wood

Reviewer Wally Wood:
Wally is a a professional writer and a member of the American Society
of Journalists and Authors. He holds a master's degree in creative
writing from the City University of New York as well as a bachelor's
degree from Columbia University where he majored in philosophy. As a
volunteer, he has taught writing in men's state prisons and to
middle-school students in his local library.

His first novel, Getting
Oriented: A Novel About Japan received positive reviews even from
people who do not know him. As a ghost-writer, he has written 19
business books, all published by commercial publishers. He has
recently published The Girl in the Photo which
is currently available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble as a trade
paperback or Kindle download.

Rachel Cusk is a British
author I'd never heard of until I began reading rave reviews her new
novel, Transit, so I immediately picked up a copy of her novel
Outline. Reportedly, Transit is the second novel in a trilogy;
Outline is the first. They join Cusk's seven other works of fiction
and three works of nonfiction. How have I managed to miss her all
this time?

Because Outline is
extraordinary. I'll go with Julie Myerson, writing in The Observer
because I cannot improve on the sentiment: "This has to be one
of the oddest, most breathtakingly original and unsettling novels
I've read in a long time."

While I am skeptical that
I can convey what makes the book so powerful (to start with, I cannot
write as well as Cusk, nor can I think as deeply), let me say a
little bit about it.

Outline is narrated by a
writer who has been invited to teach a week-long workshop in Athens.
She is divorced, has two young sons back in London. On the flight to
Greece, she falls into conversation with her seatmate, a much older,
much divorced man; in Greece she twice goes out on his boat with him;
she leads her writing class; she spends an afternoon with a friend
and a lesbian Greek writer; she talks the woman who is taking over
the apartment in which she's been staying. That's it.

Cusk violates many of the
"rules" of fiction. It is not clear what the narrator
wants—and if we don't know what a character is trying to
accomplish, how can we root for her? (If an author is as good as
Cusk, we—or I—will follow her anywhere.) There is no story arc
except that the narrator, whose name is used only once in the 249
pages, flies to Athens, spends a week there, and is about to return
to London when the book ends. On the other hand, the book is full of
stories; the people the narrator meets and her writing students tell
her stories. Self-serving, sad, charming, off-putting and on-putting
stories.

Meanwhile, the pages are
studded with comments like this: "Sometimes it has seemed to me
that life is a series of punishments for such moments of unawareness,
that one forgets one's own destiny by what one doesn't notice or feel
compassion for; that what you don't know and don't make the effort to
understand will become the very thing you are forced into knowledge
of." Think about that for a few minutes and see where it takes
you.

At the same time, Cusk is
brilliant at description: "The woman who said this was of a
glorious though eccentric appearance, somewhere in her fifties, with
a demolished beauty she bore quite regally. The bones of her face
were so impressively structured as to verge on the grotesque, an
impression she had chosen to accentuate—in a way that struck me as
distinctly and intentionally humorous—by surrounding her already
enormous blue eyes in oceans of exotic blue and green shadow and then
drawing, not carefully, around the lids with an even brighter blue;
her sharp cheekbones wore slashes of pink blusher, and her mouth,
which was unusually fleshy and pouting, was richly and inaccurately
slathered in red lipstick."

One last quote and then
I'll stop before I begin to flirt dangerously with the 'fair use'
exception of the copyright law: "There was a great difference, I
said, between the things I wanted and the things that I could
apparently have, and until I had finally and forever made my peace
with that fact, I had decided to want nothing at all." Something
else to think on for a while.

As a writer, I am dazzled
by Cusk's use of language. Consider what would happen to her second
quote above if an idiot editor insisted—as idiot writing teachers
have insisted—she excise all adverbs.

As a reader I waiting to
immerse myself in Transit when my copy arrives. But start with
Outline.